Making Continuous Improvement Stick
Dr. Pat Greco, a leadership coach and national speaker on continuous improvement, brings a candid and powerful perspective to leadership development. A retired as Superintendent of the School District of Menomonee Falls—an award-winning district serving 4,000 students in southeastern Wisconsin—Dr. Greco’s work in systems improvement has been widely recognized at national conferences and in publications like School Administrator.
This video offers a preview of her latest article, Healing Our Systems and Making Improvement Stick.
Developing Leaders to Develop People
In the video, Dr. Greco highlights the critical role leader development plays in organizational success:
“Every ounce that you invest in the development of your people will be a step forward for the organization… We are an organization of people power. Enabling the brains of that organization down to the front-line worker, investing heavily in their development, will pay dividends tenfold for the organization you serve and the community you’re committed to.”
Removing Barriers for Lasting Improvement
Dr. Greco draws a clear distinction between creating temporary workarounds and truly removing barriers. While workarounds may offer short-term relief, they leave the underlying issue intact.
“Work-arounds create a pathway to remove a barrier for [that specific instance]… but the barrier still exists within the system.”
To drive real, lasting improvement, leaders must identify root causes and empower their teams to solve problems effectively. Dr. Greco stresses the importance of teaching key skills, including situation appraisal, root cause analysis, and process evaluation:
“Taking the time to teach the skill set of understanding situation appraisal, really understanding root cause analysis, and taking a look at how your processes flow” is what ultimately helps us “figure out where those barriers exist and how to get them out of the way.”
